Next Shows at The Arts Café Mystic - The LaGrua Center

---

Featured Poet: Eleni Sikelianos

orn into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne'er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and two unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine. Memory Rehearsal, (forthcoming from City Lights) was named One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books for 2026, and is a genre-busting encounter between a poet and her ancestral past documenting a startling intersection of queer history, ancient theater, utopian visions, and modern poetry.

Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction. She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Santa Barbara, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence. 

https://www.elenisikelianos.com/

October 23: Margaret Gibson

“Poet, Author, Professor Emerita Connecticut State Poet Laureate (April 2019-2022) "Margaret Gibson has created a voice and an art that connect the sensuous experience of the physical world with the inner life,” Pattiann Rogers has written.  Nationally and internationally acclaimed, Margaret Gibson poetry is characterized by an uncommon diversity.  The voice may be predominantly lyrical and meditative, and yet there are award-winning, book-length narratives in which she fully inhabits the consciousness of her personae.  Hers is “a finely crafted lyricism and attention to detail rare among poets today,” wrote Brian Henry.  Gibson herself has said, “Writing poetry is an act of attention and receptivity.  You study whatever it is that strikes your attention—whether a scarlet tanager, river, field, or forest, whether mother, daughter, alcoholic, photographer, lover. You take what’s given into that part of the self that inquires, test, embraces, and embodies.  Outer and inner coalesce and fuse.”

https://margaretgibsonpoetry.com/

November 20: Sophie Cabot Black

Sophie Cabot Black’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Bomb, The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Tin House, among other journals. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, among them Best American Poetry, Fatherhood, Doggerel, and Poems About Horses, anthologies from the Everyman’s Library Series.

Her three books from Graywolf Press are The Misunderstanding of Nature, which received the Norma Farber Book Award from the Poetry Society of America,  The Descent, which earned the Connecticut Book Award and was nominated for the 2005 Colorado Book Award, and The Exchange, of which Publisher’s Weekly said: “Black weaves sheer elegance and devastating knowing” (starred review).

And of her newest collection, Geometry of the Restless Herd (Copper Canyon), Publisher’s Weekly said: “”Cabot Black’s stunning, fable-like fourth collection urges readers, ‘do not expect the known; you were not there.’ This unusual and poignant volume is equal parts gothic and pastoral, full of incisively written imagery characterized by sparse stanzas that allow each line to shine. . . . The poems in this collection run no risk of being mistaken for another poet’s oeuvre. Singular and striking in their movements and tone, they are a testament to delicate beauty. Cabot Black walks the tightrope between the gnomic and the visceral, and sticks the landing with the utmost skill and tenderness.”—(starred review)

She has been awarded several fellowships, including at the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute, and appears at national literary festivals such as the Los Angeles Times Book Festival and the Dodge Poetry Festival.

Black has taught at the New School, Rutgers, and Columbia University, and continues to teach at the 92nd St Y and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She holds degrees from Marlboro College and Columbia University.

Of her work NPR has called her “a poet’s poet”, Billy Collins has said,  “she has concocted a way of speaking in poetry that’s very fresh and daring”, and from the Library Journal: “lovely work for many readers; surely even those who don’t typically read poetry will find understanding here”.

She has also published several essays, translated poems, and more recently finished two song cycles and a libretto.

She was born in New York City, the daughter of a Broadway producer and an opera producer, raised on a small farm in New England, and currently divides her time between New England, New York, and Colorado.

https://sophiecabotblack.com/about-the-poet/